From exoticism to utopia – the new Japan fashion, not only in cinema
A good mixture: Zen philosophy, samurai fighting techniques, lots of green tea and even more walks in the fresh air are necessary for a traumatized American to find his way again. Edward Zwick’s film "Last Samurai" (since 8.1. in the cinema) describes an unusual learning process – for mainstream Hollywood cinema, it even amounts to a minor sensation: for in this film, Tom Cruise alias Nathan Algren, a U.S. officer who became a suicidal drunk during the Indian Wars, is a hero who hardly knows anything better, who does not give unfortunate savages the "american way of (better) life" but learns something on behalf of his audience – namely curiosity about and respect for a foreign culture that is initially difficult to understand. No self-understanding in times of "war against terror", in which Hollywood is also taken into patriotic duty by the Bush administration. By the end of the film, Cruise has become a true samurai, who speaks reasonable Japanese and has internalized many of the values of ancient Japan. He will not return to America, he despises his countrymen, who are shown in this film mainly as corrupt handlers and imperialists, and only comment helplessly on his transformation: "Why do you hate your people so much?"
At least as far as the aforementioned diatat is concerned, Cruise/Algren is quite representative of many of his compatriots today and, more generally, a lot of people in Western modernity. Asia in general and Japan in particular are chic as rare: Going to the sushi restaurant on the corner is just as much a matter of course as eating with sticks, regular training in kendo or other Japanese martial arts, but also the practice of Zen meditation. Many kids in Western European metropolises have long since swapped Donald Duck and Asterix for manga books, while their parents loll on their futons and read the latest Murakami novel, leaf through a picture book by pop architect Yoshio Taniguchi for a change, or simply patiently snip at the bonsai on the windowsill. In addition runs – pling-plang-plong – Reiki, old Japanese singing bowl music for calming down. From noodle soup to Yamamoto bathrobes, the Japanese lifestyle has long been integrated into our daily lives. But now, as can be seen in the cinema, the perception of Japan seems to be changing at last – from the foreigner, viewed with skeptical fascination and exotic curiosity, Japan is becoming a new utopia, a better version of the familiar modernity.
Tokyo Story
Coinciding with "Last Samurai" another film started now: "Lost in Translation", the acclaimed second work by Sofia Coppola, daughter of the rough-and-tumble New Hollywood hero Francis Ford Coppola, tells the seemingly well-worn story of the old man and the girl in tender, highly sensitive images once again in a completely new and unusual way. Among the many features of this film is that its two main characters are stranded in a luxury hotel in Tokyo. During the nights, when they can’t sleep because of jet lag and melancholy, they explore a hypermodern Tokyo, which in its chaotic and inscrutable yet fascinating form becomes a mirror of their inner disorientation. A "Realm of characters", as the French semiologist Roland Barthes once conjured it up, as well as inventing it in the first place. Coppola also leans stylistically on her setting: The film’s images are bright, pastel, somehow familiar, fragmentary, and yet deeply emotional. At least in their surface appearance they remind of Japanese cinema. Like the characters, the camera drifts through the night, supported by precisely chosen electropop music that seems to plunge everything into a trance. As if the images were sleepwalking.
Quentin Tarantino has obviously also fallen in love with Japanese cinema. Only a few weeks ago came "Kill Bill No.1" to the cinema, the second part follows in march. In this, the critic-darling Uma Thurman, as a lonely avenger, sends her into a magic realm composed of the poses and characters, daydreams and styles of Asian, especially Japanese cinema.
"Yellow Peril"
There is no question: Japan is obviously very fashionable in contemporary Hollywood. Where does this plotzliche interest come from?? And what does it mean? The fact that people in the West are interested in Asia is in itself nothing new. So zahlreich wie regelmabig sind seit den ersten Reiseberichten aus Japan Mitte des 18.The wave movements in which the country regularly became fashionable for a good decade of the twentieth century. But for a long time such interest remained mainly "Orientalism" (Edward Said): Japan was primarily seen as something very foreign, very different, an incomprehensible, somehow also sinister region that seemed a bit backward, and in doubt also quite threatening – a "Yellow Peril."
The Second World War with Japan’s imperial dreams, the brutal colonial rule in the conquered territories, the alliance with the fascist Axis powers, and finally the invasion of Pearl Harbor gave such ideas additional nourishment. It was no different in the cinema. Even in the late 80s, a Hollywood movie caused a furor: In "Black Rain" Ridley Scott loves Michael Douglas as a U.S. policeman staggering through a dark and inscrutable Tokyo. Some accused the film of racism in its portrayal of the Japanese. But "Black Rain" – the title, by the way, refers to the ash fall after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima – is already double-bottomed: The Douglas character is a frustrated cynic, a "bad policemen", who regains self-respect through an encounter with a Japanese colleague, and a "good cop" becomes. Besides, this lesson in the Japanese way of life also leads to a better understanding of Japan and its people – and to a sense of guilt for American wartime deeds, such as the two atomic bombs dropped in 1945.
But even in such movies Japan still remains "the other", the former enemy. Japan acts here, as even still in "Last Samurai" as a disciplined and spiritual antithesis to a chaotic America, as the alternative to a democratic one, characterized by tradition, hierarchies and aristocratic values "Contingency and irony" (Richard Rorty) dominated, "transcendental homeless" Modernity.
Ignorance Flexibility
What is fascinating about contemporary Japan today, on the other hand, is precisely this contingent, ironic, Western modernity, which in the "Empire of the rising sun" seems to unfold in an even more rapid and unbounded way. If anywhere the dictum of Rimbaudian poetry – "Il faut etre absoluement moderne" – If you take the concept of freedom seriously and translate it into everyday life, then here it is: In Japan, you can meet a freedom that comes from obscurity and disorder. And one suspects that disintegration and decadence can also become an opportunity for individual liberation. That Japan is nevertheless – also – a rigid disciplinary society, is not to be denied at all. It is to be denied that the western societies are less so. They are just different, and we Western observers are so used to our forms of discipline and control that we hardly notice them anymore – and the Japanese ones all the more so.
What is unique is the mixture of ignorance and flexibility with which this country insists on its cultural traditions, and yet still manages to smoothly reconcile them with the most radical thrusts of technical or social modernization. In many ways, Japan seems like an intensified version of the U.S. – and yet at the same time it is unmistakably a cultural antithesis to the dominating Americanism, of which many are weary at the moment. And only a completely foreign place, at the same time so modern and so similar to us, still allows the shamelessly curious view of the foreign. In addition, there is currently another, recently discovered relationship: Japan has known the economic crisis that the West is currently experiencing since the end of the 1980s – and has long been accustomed to what the West is just beginning to learn: how to live well with the crisis.
Japan’s immense productivity, the imagination of its inventors, is no more constrained by stagnation in the stock market and political reform than is the power of Japanese aesthetics. Maybe this is what we can learn from Japan today. Japan still stands for hypermodernism in every conceivable form, for the world’s best industrial design and wildly fascinating mix of styles. This can also be seen in the shrill merchandise world of children’s labels like "Hello Kitty", as in the phanomenal-futuristic Japanese architecture, in the offensives of the games "Tamagotchi", "Pokemon" and "Digimon"-games, in anime movies as already years ago "Ghost in the Shell", last "Chihiro in the Magic Kingdom" – with which an anime won an A-film festival at the Berlinale for the first time two years ago – or the fairy tale-like films of Takeshi Kitano, Japanese advertising design and communication technology, shrill Nippon doodle pop, the kitsch universes of the quite normal, for us nevertheless unimaginable madness of Japanese TV stations and the neon backdrop of the big city. Wer – und sei es nur virtuell – nach Japan reist, fahrt nach "Tomorrowland" (William Gibson).
Coppola and Tarantino also made this experience and they process it in their films. Perhaps the filmmakers and all of us will soon have to rethink. For more and more another, long neglected country is making its presence felt: China. Shanghai, no longer Tokyo, is already considered the capital of the current decade. And, in fact, besides Japan, cinema is gradually rediscovering the rest of the Far East. Thus, no film has done more for Hollywood’s turn away from Old Europe, towards the Pacific West, than the floating martial arts fighters in "Tiger Dragon" – by the Chino-American Ang Lee. The sun rises in the east.